King of the North

by Harry Turtledove

  Stribog realized too late that he was no longer doing Mavrix any harm. He boomed like thunder again, but this time in alarm. Where before he had reached as high as the eye—or whatever sense passed for vision here—could see and Mavrix seemed small beside him, their relative sizes reversed with startling speed. Now, from his place in the Sithonian god’s consciousness, Gerin peered down on a small, furious, futile whirlwind that churned up the snow around Mavrix’s ankles.

  Mavrix stooped and seized the whirlwind. He flung it away: whither, the Fox had no idea. Maybe Mavrix didn’t, either, for he said, “I hope the alepot tempest lands among the Kizzuwatnan gods or some others who properly appreciate heat.”

  He was, without warning, the apparent size he had been before his fight with Stribog began. He reached up and adjusted the wreath of grape leaves around his forehead to the proper jaunty angle. The landscape of Gradihome seemed undisturbed by the divine tempest that had lashed it; Gerin wished the land of the material world recovered from rain so readily.

  “Onward,” Mavrix said, and onward they went. But the Sithonian god, despite his triumph, seemed wearier and less sure of himself than he had been. If defeating Lavtrig was like climbing a flight of stairs, besting Stribog had been more like climbing a mountain. If the next challenge proved correspondingly harder still … Gerin did his best not to think about that, for fear Mavrix would sense it and be moved either to anger or to despair.

  The god came to a clearing in the snowy woods. Gerin waited to see what sort of Gradi god would confront Mavrix there, but the clearing seemed empty. More snow-covered pines stood at the far edge of the open space, perhaps a bowshot away, perhaps a bit more.

  “Well,” Mavrix said brightly, “Variety in the landscape after all. Who would have thought it?” He brought his pipes to his lips and began to play a cheerful tune as he strolled across the rolling ground.

  Had Gerin had his normal, physical eyes, he would have blinked. Something strange had happened, but he wasn’t sure what. The god came to a clearing in the snowy woods. Gerin waited to see what sort of Gradi god would confront Mavrix there, but the clearing seemed empty. More snow-covered pines stood at the far edge of the open space, perhaps a bowshot away, perhaps a bit more.

  “Well,” Mavrix said brightly, “variety in the landscape after all. Who would have thought it?” He brought his pipes to his lips and began to play a cheerful tune as he strolled across the rolling ground.

  That sensation of needing to blink repeated itself in the Fox’s mind. There was the clearing … the same clearing. When Gerin realized that, he recovered at least a part of what he and Mavrix had just been through.

  “Well,” Mavrix said brightly, “variety in the landscape after all. Who would have thought it?” He brought his pipes to his lips.

  Before he could begin to play, Gerin said, “Wait!”

  “What do you mean, wait?” the Sithonian god demanded irritably. “I aim to celebrate coming across something different for a change.” And then Mavrix, as Gerin had before him, hesitated and went back over what had gone on. “Have I—done this before?” he asked, now sounding hesitant rather than irritable.

  “I—think so,” Gerin answered, still far from sure himself.

  “I am in your debt, little man,” Mavrix said. “I wonder how many times I would have done that before I twigged to it myself. I wonder if I would ever have twigged to it myself if I didn’t have you riding along like a flea on my bum. It would have been a beastly boring way to spend eternity, I can tell you that.”

  Gerin wondered if the only reason he hadn’t been completely caught in the trap was its being set for gods, not mere men. He had spoken before of mankind’s occasional advantages in dealing with vastly more powerful beings, but hadn’t expected his littleness to become one: he’d slipped through the spaces in a net intended to catch bigger fish.

  In tones more cautious than Mavrix usually used, he asked, “Who is out there in the clearing?”

  Nothing answered: “I am Nothing,” it said, voice utterly without color or emotion.

  “Trust these stupid Gradi to worship Nothing,” Mavrix muttered.

  “Why not?” Nothing returned. “Soon or late, all fails. In the end, everything fails. I am what is left. I deserve worship, for I am most powerful of all.”

  “You’re not even the most powerful god in your pantheon,” Gerin jeered, trying to ruffle that uncanny calm. “Voldar rules the Gradi, not you.”

  “For now,” Nothing said imperturbably.

  “Stand aside, Nothing, or know nothingness,” Mavrix said. From caution, he had swung back to anger.

  “Wait,” Gerin said again. If finding a way to hurt Stribog had been hard, how could the Sithonian god harm Nothing? Hoping he was pitching his thoughts in such a way as to let Mavrix but not Nothing hear them, he suggested, “Don’t fight—distract. You’re a fertility god—you can make all sorts of interesting … somethings, can’t you?”

  Mavrix’s mirth filled him, as strong sweet wine might have had he been there in the flesh. “Somethings,” the god said, and then, changing the timbre of his thoughts so he addressed not the Fox but the thing—or the no-thing—in the clearing: “Nothing!”

  “Aye?” the Gradi god said, polite but perfectly indifferent.

  Mavrix held out his hands. He breathed on them, and a flock of bright-colored singing birds appeared, one after another. “Do you see these?” he asked as he waved his hands and the birds began to fly around the clearing.

  “I see them,” Nothing replied. “In a little while, in a littlest while, they will cease to be. Then they will be mine.”

  “That’s so,” Mavrix agreed, “but they’re mine now. And so is this.” He sent a deer bounding across the open space. Gerin hoped the wolves of Gradihome wouldn’t notice it. “And so are these.” Flowers sprang up in the clearing, made with a purpose now instead of merely for a game. “And so is this.” An amphora of wine appeared. “And so are these.” Four preternaturally beautiful women and a like number of handsome and well-endowed men sprang into being. They enjoyed the wine and then began to enjoy one another. They had no more inhibitions than they did clothes.

  Gerin wondered if they were figments of the Sithonian god’s imagination or if Mavrix had plucked them from some warmer, more hospitable clime. He didn’t ask, not wanting to bump the god’s metaphysical elbow.

  “They’re all mine!” Mavrix shouted. “They’re all doing things, right there before you.”

  “For now,” Nothing said.

  “Yes, for now,” Mavrix said. “And the things they do now will cause other things to be done and to be born, and those will cause still others, and the ripples that spread from those will—”

  “Eventually come to Nothing,” Nothing said, but with—perhaps?—the slightest hesitation as Mavrix’s creations cavorted in the clearing.

  Speaking in a sort of mental whisper, Mavrix said to Gerin, “If it’s not distracted now, it never will be. I am going into the clearing. If I end up here again and that space before us is empty—we are apt to be here … indefinitely.”

  Gerin’s small sensorium, carried pickaback on the god’s vastly larger one, crossed the clearing in a hurry. He could even look back as Mavrix regained the path that led ever deeper into Gradihome. All at once, the Sithonian god’s creations vanished as if they had never been.

  “That was petty of old Nothing,” Mavrix said, a chuckle in his voice. “As it told us, they would have been its sooner or later. Ah, well—some deities simply have no patience.” Then Mavrix suddenly seemed less sure of himself. “Or do you think Nothing will pursue me through this frigid wilderness?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say no,” Gerin answered. “The Gradi gods seem to be testing you, each in his own place. Lavtrig and Stribog stayed behind once you’d bested them. I think Nothing will, too.”

  “You had better be right,” Mavrix said. “And if I have to test and best every single puerile godlet the Gradi own—or the other
way round—I shall grow quite testy myself, Fox. Bear that in mind.”

  “Oh, I shall,” Gerin assured him. “I shall.” Mavrix was more powerful than he; he knew that full well. But he had seen the progression in the actions of the Gradi gods where Mavrix was uncertain about it. Did that prove him divinely clever? If it did, he was clever enough to know he shouldn’t let himself get carried away by the idea.

  He did not think Mavrix had stepped up the pace, but the next clearing appeared very quickly. Mavrix went out into it with almost defiant stride, as if expecting Nothing to sow confusion in his mind once more.

  But the god—or rather, goddess—standing in the open space had a definite physical aspect. “Gerin the Fox, the Elabonian,” Voldar said. “You have proved more troublesome than I reckoned on, and your ally stronger.” Her smile struck the Fox as imperfectly inviting. “Whether he is strong enough remains to be seen.”

  Her aspect was not quite as Gerin had seen her in the dream she’d induced him to have. She seemed partway toward the hag image with which she’d so horrified Adiatunnus—now and again, by starts and flickers, her hair would gray, her skin wrinkle, her teeth grow broken and crooked, her breasts lose their eternally youthful firmness and sag downward against her chest and the top of her belly. Sometimes her whole body seemed squat, slightly misshapen—and sometimes not. Gerin had no idea what her true seeming was, or if indeed she had but one true seeming.

  Mavrix spoke with some indignation: “Well! I like that: a goddess greeting a mortal before a god. But I’m not surprised, not with what I’ve seen of manners here in Gradihome. Go ahead—ignore me.”

  “Nothing tried that,” Voldar said. “It failed. That means I must deal with you—and when I have, you’ll wish you’d been ignored. But I spoke to the mortal first because, without him, you would not be here—and would not have caused so much damage to the lesser gods around me.”

  “I greeted them in the spirit with which they greeted me,” Mavrix replied. “Is it my fault if their spirits could not bear up under the force of my greeting?”

  “Yes,” Voldar said in the deadly cold voice Gerin remembered from his dream. “You should have been driven from Gradihome wailing, or been swallowed by Nothing for all eternity.”

  “I’d be delighted to leave this cold, ugly place,” the Sithonian god said, “and I will, in an instant, once you vow you’ll make no more of the material world into as close a copy of it as you can engender. God may not lie to god in such vows: so it has been, so it is, so shall it be.”

  “I could lie to you,” Voldar said, “but I shall not. Gradihome in the world grows. So it is, so shall it be.”

  “No,” Mavrix said. “It shall not be. There is too much cold and ugliness and sterility in the material world as it is now. I shall not permit you to increase their grip on it.”

  “You cannot stop it,” Voldar said. “You have not the power for that, nor have you the roots in the land of which you speak that would let you draw upon its strength, as we even now are beginning to do.”

  “It is not your land, either,” Mavrix said. “And if I have not the strength, how do I come to stand before you now?”

  “You come before me, as I said before, on account of the guile of the mortal whose consciousness you carry with you,” Voldar answered, “and I should not be surprised if his cunning helped you pass and overcome my fellows.”

  “Well! I like that!” Mavrix drew himself up straight, the picture of affronted dignity. “First speak to the mortal ahead of me, then count him as more clever. I shall take vengeance for the slight.”

  Gerin felt rather like a mouse that had the misfortune to find itself in the middle of a clearing where a bear and a longtooth clashed. Whichever won might not even matter to him, because they were liable to crush him without so much as knowing he was there.

  And yet the fight did not begin at once. Voldar was plainly given pause because Mavrix had managed to reach her, and Mavrix in turn seemed thoughtful at facing the goddess who lorded it over the formidable foes he had already beaten.

  Suddenly, his voice grew sweet, persuasive, tempting: “Why do we have to quarrel at all, Gradi goddess? You can be pleasing to the eye when it suits you; I sense as much. Why not lie with me in love? Once you know what proper pleasure is, you’ll feel less attracted toward death and doom and ice.” He began to play on his pipes, a tune a shepherd might have used to lure a goose girl to a secluded meadow on a warm summer evening.

  But Voldar was no goose girl, and Gradihome knew nothing of warmth. “You cannot seduce me from my purpose, foreign god. May your lust curdle and freeze; may your ardor wither.”

  “I am ardor,” Mavrix said, “nothing else but, and I kindle it in others. I would try even in you, to teach you somewhat of the ways of existence about which, it would seem, you now know nothing.”

  “I told you, I am not your receptacle.” Voldar’s voice grew sharp. “Leave Gradihome now and you will suffer nothing further. If you stay, you will learn the consequences of your folly.”

  “I am folly,” Mavrix said, in the same tone of voice he had used to declare himself ardor. Gerin thought he meant the one as much as the other. Ardor, to his way of thinking, certainly engendered folly. Maybe that was what the god had had in mind.

  “You are a fool, that certainly.” Voldar spoke as Gerin might have while chiding a vassal for something stupid he’d done. “Very well. If you will be a fool, you will pay for it.” Raising her great axe, she advanced on Mavrix.

  All the Sithonian tales of the fertility god named him an arrant coward. The Fox had seen some of that himself. He more than half expected Mavrix to run away from that determined, menacing advance. Instead, though, Mavrix jeered, “Are you truly a battleaxe, Voldar, or just after my spear?” That part of him leaped, leaving Voldar in no possible doubt of his meaning.

  She snarled something Gerin didn’t understand, which was probably just as well. Then she swung the axe with a stroke any of the warriors who worshiped her would have been proud to claim as his own. Gerin wondered what would have happened had that blow landed as she intended. His best guess was that the Sithonian pantheon would have wanted a new deity.

  But the blow did not land. Mavrix’s phallus was not all that had leaped. He used his wand to bat the axehead aside. The thyrsus looked as if it would break at such usage, but looks, when it came to gods and their implements, were apt to be deceiving.

  Voldar evidently had been deceived. She shouted in fury at finding herself thwarted. “There, there,” Mavrix said in syrupy, soothing tones, and reach out to pat her—not at all consolingly—on her bare backside. Gerin couldn’t tell whether his arm had got long to let him do that, or whether he’d shifted his position in some way allowed to gods but not men and then returned in an instant to where he had been.

  However he’d done it, it made Voldar even angrier than she had been already. Her next cut with that axe would have left Mavrix metaphorically spearless. Again, he used the wand to turn aside the stroke, though Gerin, perched there on the edge of his consciousness, felt the effort that had required. Mavrix was not a god of war, where Voldar seemed to exist for no other purpose than conquest and subjugation.

  “Are you going to be able to hold out against her?” he asked the Sithonian god. The question had immediate practical import for him. If Voldar beat Mavrix, would his own spirit be trapped here in Gradihome? He was hard-pressed to imagine a gloomier fate.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” Mavrix answered, not the most reassuring reply the Fox could have got.

  He quickly became convinced Mavrix was overmatched. The Sithonian god was indeed no killer; he sought to provoke Voldar, to infuriate her, to drive her to distraction. She, by contrast, was grimly intent on harming him—on destroying him, if she could.

  The longer they struggled, the more Gerin grew concerned she could do exactly as she intended. This was not a struggle of the same sort as Mavrix had had with the other Gradi gods. It put the Fox more in min
d of some of the desperate fights he’d had on the battlefield, ferocious brawls with anything past the notion of bare survival forgotten. Voldar and Mavrix hammered and pounded and cursed each other, the curses landing as heavily and painfully as kicks and buffets.

  When Mavrix squeezed her, Voldar would for a moment weaken and lean toward him as if intending an embrace: the struggle was, in some ways, a spectacularly violent attempt at a seduction. But Voldar never really came close to yielding, however much Gerin wished and hoped she would. She had her own purposes, which were not those of Mavrix.

  And when she gained the upper hand for the time being, the Fox felt Mavrix’s nature changing into something harder and colder than seemed fitting for the Sithonian god. Voldar, he realized, was trying to bend Mavrix to her will no less than he her to his. Those stretches came more and more often as the battle progressed. Gerin wondered if Mavrix realized as much himself, and if he should warn the god.

  Suddenly Mavrix gave a great cry—not of pain but of rejection—and broke away from Voldar. The disengagement was not like that between two struggling humans. One instant, he was locked in the fight with the Gradi goddess, the next he stood at the edge of the clearing in which she had awaited him.

  “No,” he said hoarsely. “You shall not make me into something you can rule.” He understood the stakes, then. “I will not allow it. I do not allow it.”

  “If you stay here, I shall,” Voldar said. “This is Gradihome, and Gradihome is mine.” She strode toward the Sithonian fertility god, implacable purpose on her face and in every line of her body.

  Mavrix broke and fled. Voldar’s harsh, mocking laughter rang in his ears as he dashed away, snow flying up under his sandal-clad feet. “Be careful,” Gerin shouted in his metaphysical ear. “Don’t fall into Nothing’s lair again.”

  Mavrix swerved aside, off the path. The fierce wolves of the home of the Gradi gods came coursing after him, but fawned like friendly pups once more when they drew near: so much of his power, at least, he still retained. And then he was on the path again, and running faster than ever. “I thank you for reminding me of the trap,” he said, “though I do not thank you for involving me in this misadventure in the first place.”